were an obscure area of the law, but I wasfascinated you could do something forpeople as a group and balance the scales,”she says. “I went to college in Berkeley, soI believed in the slogan: ‘The people unitedwill never be defeated.’”In 2000, Cabraser was among the classcounsel for the $1.2 billion reparationsettlement for Holocaust survivors and theirheirs against banks, private manufacturersand other corporations who looted the assetsof Jews and other minority groups persecutedby the Nazi Regime.

“It was half political and half litigation,”
she says. “If it was just a litigation matter,
we would have probably failed, because
there were all kinds of problems with
treaties and statutes of limitations.”
However, she says, it was the perfect timing
and political climate, with governments and
Swiss banks wanting to address the matter.

In the end, the lawyers agreed that the
class members should decide how the sum
should be split, and 400,000 suggestions
poured in. “We put our faith in the idea
that the people who had been through this
could come up with a more just resolution
than well-meaning lawyers,” she says.

As Holocaust survivors testified before thejudge, bringing the courtroom to tears withtheir stories, the survivors would ultimatelyend by saying that they personally weredoing fine, but knew some other survivorwho could use help and the judgmentshould favor them. “No one asked foranything for themselves,” Cabraser says.

With the $1.5 million in court-awardedfees, her firm endowed a human rightschair at Columbia Law School. She says,“The amazing thing about civil litigationis that every so often you have a chance todo a repair job, either preventing a harmor restoring health or lives, rather than justShe points to fen-phen, an anti-obesitytreatment shown to cause hypertensionand heart valve issues. As part of the2000 settlement, a medical-monitoringfund was set up for testing, since thedefect showed no symptoms early on.That meant the cases would disappear,which was fine with Cabraser.

“The best thing we could do was put
ourselves out of business in terms of
this case,” she says. “Corporate America
would not suddenly become angelic.
There would be plenty of personal injury
cases in the future.”

Hitting the Right Note

Beginning in her early teens,
Elizabeth Cabraser drummed
in rock bands, and even during
law school she believed she
would become a professional
musician. “But then disco
happened, and all the live-music venues died in the
1970s,” she says. “I thought I
would be a gigging musician,
but I didn’t have the talent or
star quality to be a rock star.”
While going to school, she got
a job at a music repair shop.
She is now a business partner
in Steve Maxwell Vintage and
Custom Drums, and hangs out
at the Manhattan store when
she finds herself in New York
with a few hours to spare.

She still plays on weekends—
from live music venues to
weddings—and her approach to
music is remarkably similar to
her stance on law: “Drummers
pull the music apart and put
it back together,” she says.
“You’ve got to be a great
listener to play in a band.
Sometimes the best player
is not the person you want in
the band, because they are so
accomplished, they don’t want
to dumb it down. The best bass
player is not necessarily the
best, but someone who will
work with me.”